Thank you, Mr. Chair, and through you, thank you to the witnesses for coming and speaking to us today.
This is very intriguing to me. I had never heard about equine therapy before, so I am fascinated by it.
I wanted to start with Colonel McLeod.
Your remarks conclude with the statement that, "Our number one priority is to develop and deliver to our men and women in uniform the mental health care programs that they need and deserve." It's set out that this is the number one priority.
My concern is that this notion of evidence-based therapies perhaps doesn't contradict that statement, but I don't think it's entirely consistent with that statement, because what we seem to be hearing.... Actually, you comment that this “does not mean that the therapy has been shown to be of no value”. You are identifying here that there's certainly some evidence that equine therapy is at least potentially of value to our forces. If they are our number one priority, why do we use this notion of "evidence-based" as a kind of shield to keep equine therapy out of the range of therapies that we are prepared to try for our forces?